The heavy cardboard of the three-inch payroll binders scraped against my ribs as I lifted the third stack from the high shelf.
My vision shrank to a gray circle with fuzzy edges, but twenty-four department reports still required my signature before the system locked at midnight.
Jenna Vance, our senior payroll clerk, clicked her ballpoint pen three times before she reached for the top binder.
“Let me take those down to the car for you, Mallory,” Jenna said, her fingers already wrapping around the plastic spine. “You have been staring at the September tax schedules since seven this morning, and your face is the color of printer paper.”
“I have exactly forty-two minutes before the clearinghouse closes the batch transmission,” I said, smoothing my left shirt cuff down to cover my watch. “If the bank routing numbers for the field offices do not match the ledger by five, seventy-eight people will not receive their direct deposits on Friday.”
My thumb pressed against the corner of my yellow legal notepad, where I had listed the discrepancies in our third-quarter adjustments.
Jenna tugged gently on the blue binder, but I held on until the skin over my knuckles turned white.
“You are running a fever, Mallory,” Jenna said, her voice dropping into a flat, office whisper. “Your husband is already in the driveway because I called him twenty minutes ago.”
“I just need to finish this one payroll run before I can go home,” I said.
My fingers slipped off the slick vinyl of the binder, and the heavy plastic edge struck the edge of the copy table with a hollow thud.
The heat in the copy room seemed to rise by ten degrees in five seconds, thick with the smell of warm toner and fresh paper.
Ethan stood by the open passenger door of our sedan, the heat from the asphalt radiating through the thin soles of my work shoes.
He checked his wristwatch as I approached, his brow furrowed as he looked past my shoulder toward the glass doors of the office building.
